


Petrichor

by rukafais



Category: Hollow Knight (Video Game)
Genre: Don’t copy to another site, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-09
Updated: 2019-03-09
Packaged: 2019-11-14 10:22:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,618
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18050693
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rukafais/pseuds/rukafais
Summary: In endless sleep, Lurien dreams of the life and world he left behind.“Your absence has gone through meLike thread through a needle.Everything I do is stitched with its color.”W. S. Merwin, “Separation”





	Petrichor

**Author's Note:**

> This work is a gift for atara-08 on Tumblr and has been mirrored here for convenience and accessibility.

He is one of three, seal upon the Vessel. Life willingly given in service, to sleep. For a city’s protection, for a king beloved.

He has always been a good servant. He has always been devoted. He has lived for the city, for the King; even before he gave himself up without hesitation, gladly offered everything he was and ever would be, his life already belonged to it. It was only a matter of time, to be asked for and to answer.

He was a perfect choice. Singlemindedly devoted, wholeheartedly loyal.

He should not dream. He knows this. It could compromise the Seal, and worse, the Vessel itself, who may even now hear the Dreamers’ thoughts.

He should not dream, nor lose himself in memory, nor think of anything but his duty.

Lurien the Watcher gives all and leaves nothing for himself.

Lurien, without title, without any home but Hallownest, aches for the sound of rain.

They are fragments. They are indulgences.

He holds them close to the heart, one of the few things he has been allowed to keep in the depths of this vast and endless sleep.

It is the _sound_ \- the sound that pounds endlessly against the glass in his memories, that has soothed his worries and lulled him to slumber so many times - that creeps into the too-bright landscape of the dream first.

* * *

_The rain is unceasing. It always pours here; it shapes the world, and everything in it. It beats down stone and reshapes it; it falls down curves of metal, each droplet a new and ringing note._

_Few things move him, it’s said. He hears them whisper in the streets, in the palace; the Watcher, cold and unfeeling, the impartial observer with a heart of stone and steel. A sentinel whose only love is the King himself, they say. Parents use him as a threat against their children, if they are unruly or disobedient; I’ll send you to the spire, and you’ll never return._

_Only in the silence of his spire does he escape it, if escape is truly the right word._

_He has never particularly cared for the opinions of other bugs, nor what they think of him - only that they leave him be, and do not impede his actions. He acts for their own good, as the King acts for Hallownest’s future; it is not required that he is loved._

_He adjusts the telescope, and paints in silence. The scratch of brush on canvas is the only sound in the room, aside from the constant rain._

_Under his paintbrush, colours smear and blur, blending together until they become shapes and backdrops, a silhouette of the city’s buildings viewed through the rainswept glass of a curved lens._

_He raises his head to look at the gallery he’s created. Pictures of rain-rinsed streets, sketches of guards and citizens with colourful umbrellas or withstanding the downpour. Portraits of those who found the patience to pose and model for his meticulous, self-indulgent hobby._

_He feels a soft swell of quiet pride._

_The rain continues to fall._

* * *

The dream is unmoved by his memories.

It is bright and dry and hot, and full of an alien, scorching light. Nothing like the gentle light of the lumafly lamps, or the pale light of his beloved king. No rain has ever touched this sky, no darkness could survive here save the endless abyss of the Vessel.

Eyes closed against those painful rays, he recalls the touch of chill glass at his fingertips, the smooth metal of a balcony railing. The sound of water dripping.

In his head, it rains.

In his head, there is a time almost forgotten, distant. He has almost lost it.

Almost.

He remembers--

* * *

_He remembers the storm rolling in, the grey sky, the dark clouds. He remembers the cold wind biting at his exposed shell, scraping at his face._

_(He had no mask, then.)_

_He remembers shivering, breathing hard, not out of fear or even entirely out of cold, but a kind of excitement._

_A cloak was dropped and bundled around his shoulders, around his slight, small form; too big to be made for him. Comforting all the same. Warm and soft and heavy, a protection against the chill._

_Someone’s presence at his back, someone’s hands on his shoulders. A quiet voice from a past so far away that the words are forgotten and only the tone remains._

_Thunder roars, high above. The rain comes hard and fast, the drumming of it filling his entire world. The wind howls._

_He remembers the high sound of what must be his own voice raised in laughter._

_Even that is a stranger to him._

* * *

\--so little, in the end. Memories of Hallownest, that ageless kingdom, have buried what little remained.

He feels no regrets. So little of his past, before the kingdom, was worth regarding.

In his head he shapes the almost-forgotten storm, reconciles it with that endless downpour from the city he so loves. From his memories he spins the dark, cold spire, whose dry and chilly rooms are so unlike this radiant, uncomfortable heat.

It becomes his shield.

The Light imprisoned screams from the Vessel’s heart and demands worship. Demands remembrance, demands release. Heat radiates in pulses, in waves, and in it he hears that clamouring voice that scratched at his dreams, even now rings in his head.

(Lurien the Watcher looks impassively from his spire at the burning sea below, and though the light claws and rams against the windows he remembers with exacting, meticulous clarity, there is no crack and no stain upon the glass. His telescope is not marred nor twisted or melted by the heat; his paintings do not fade or dry in the presence of the sun.

No beam of light touches the floors here. For the love of the King, for the love of his city, he creates an impenetrable fortress to keep it safe. He _becomes_ it.

His heart is unwavering, unmovable, focused. He traps the light with his own forgetfulness, his own refusal to consider that outside influence.

So it is, and so it always shall be.

If he regrets anything, it is --)

* * *

_“This is the price to keep Hallownest safe,” the Pale King says, without inflection or emotion. The same unwavering conviction, the same calm, he has always had. “To ensure that it will always stand.”_

_(The same unerring will that had captured Lurien so intensely, and never let him go.)_

_Lurien stands at the walkway, a respectful distance from his King, and looks down into darkness._

_The cost, the price. Paid with a mechanical precision, an exacting calculation._

_To protect the city, to protect its inhabitants, to protect the kingdom, it should be done. It must be done. It must be done._

_The discard of failures, until the perfect vessel is found._

_(The slaughter of children, until the perfect one is born.)_

_He has long since stopped asking how the Pale King bears the weight of his designs. More than anything, he understands this -_

_the Pale King either holds it so well that no trace of his true feelings remains, or he does not consider it a weight at all._

_(He does not know which he would prefer, or even if the preference would make things less terrible._

_But then, is that not why he follows him? For that conviction, for that light that never wavers._

_No matter how stained and bloodied the price, the Pale King pays it. All for Hallownest’s sake._

_Is that not honorable, in its own way?)_

_He stands at the walkway and observes his King at work, and understands why he is here._

_As the Watcher, he bears witness to what lies hidden beneath the Palace, beneath the City itself. That death, that darkness, that price paid in void that cries like the living and stains like blood._

_The Pale King watches as the machines he has created slaughter yet another batch of failures._

_The discarded vessels (the dying children) fall so far into the abyss that he doesn’t hear them hit the ground._

_“We will seal this place, once the Vessel is born,” he says. “There is no need for anyone else to witness such shameful failures.”  
_

_Lurien lets no emotion show in his voice.  
_

_“It will be as you wish.”_

_He feels the grip of guilt, of pain, a vice that twists his heart in his chest.  
_

_There is no rain to soothe him here.  
_

_Only that crushing, deafening silence._

* * *

\-- if he regrets anything, it is that final, ultimate price paid.

The cost that -- even now -- is bound in chains and holds their bright nightmare at bay, beating unbearably where a heart should be.

But the Seals must hold. For King beloved, for city protected, they must hold.

He does not waver. He cannot. The price has already been paid; to try and release it now would waste everything they had worked for.

He has no illusions that his guilt somehow absolves him of the situation, or washes his hands of those dark stains;

he witnessed, he watched, and he did nothing.

If the day comes when the Seals are broken, though he hopes it will not come, though he hopes seal and prison will do what they were meant to do and hold forever and preserve forever--

\--he will accept the judgement.

Lurien the Watcher dreams of a long-lost spire under endless rain, and does not wake, and does not let that light escape. He bends himself to his duty with a will of steel.

_(Lurien, who came to a kingdom long ago and left his past and name behind, nurses the pain of guilt that never fades and wonders if it was worth the price.)_


End file.
